Out of Range (29 page)

“Keep the volume all the way down,” Bello said. “If you need to talk to me about something, hit the chirp key and then turn the volume up a quarter of the way. But I hope we don’t need to talk.”

Barnum clipped the radio to his shirt pocket.

“Remember the plan?” Bello asked.

“No, I forgot it,” Barnum said gruffly, being sarcastic.

Bello’s eyes bored into the exsheriff. “Strange time for jokes.”

“When we have a visual,” Barnum said, using the same words Bello had used earlier, “we signal each other by waving our hands, palms out. Then we both sight him in and when you give the signal, a double chirp from the radio, we fire at the same time so we increase our chances of knocking him down for good.”

“Aim for his chest,” Bello said, interrupting, “with the crosshairs on the middle of the widest part of him. Forget about taking a head shot at this distance.”

“When he’s down,” Barnum continued, stepping on Bello’s words, “we wait an hour, keeping the body in the scope and checking for movement. If we don’t see any, you’ll go down and drag him into the river. I’ll stay back and keep watch down the road.”

Bello listened intently, his eyes on Barnum, making sure the exsheriff had everything correct. Barnum didn’t like being looked at that way, and didn’t make a secret of it in his rehearsed delivery.

“Okay, then,” Bello said, turning and walking down the middle of the twotrack. Barnum followed.

There were problems with Bello’s plan, Barnum thought.

He’d reviewed it the night before, turning it over again and again, and finally figured out what was wrong with it: He was being set up. When Bello double chirped and Barnum fired, Bello would deliberately miss, so the only slug to be found in Romanowski’s body would be the .270 round.

Everyone knew Barnum hunted with a .270, and a ballistics check would tie the slug to the rifle.

Barnum was well known as a drinker and a talker, and the whole town was aware of his humiliation at the Stockman’s. If Romanowski’s body was found, and it would no doubt wash up somewhere downriver, Barnum would be a suspect.

By then, Bello would be long gone.

Of course, Barnum would implicate Bello. But, Barnum had realized, what did he really know about the man from Virginia? Was his name even Randan Bello? Barnum had never seen an ID. Was he even from Virginia, or were those stolen or counterfeit plates on his car? The man had been meticulous since arriving about leaving no records by paying for everything with cash. He had spilled everything out to Barnum so easily about the agency, and his soninlaw, and his intentions. Bello didn’t seem like the kind of man to expose himself that way. The only reason he had done so, Barnum concluded, was because he saw in the exsheriff a way to pin the murder on someone else.

But that wasn’t going to happen, Barnum said to himself while he walked. When that double chirp came, the exsheriff was going to swing his rifle around and shoot Bello in the head.

That would give the morning men at the BurgOPardner something to talk about.

“I went to the sheriff with my concerns,” Barnum would say, widening his hounddog eyes, looking at each com

munity leader in turn, “but he practically threw me out of his office. So I had to take care of things myself.”

“Sounds like we need a new sheriff,” someone would say, should say, perhaps the mayor. And they would all look to him.

“I don’t know, fellows,” Barnum would say humbly. “I was just getting used to being retired.”

Bello stopped and gestured at the sky. Barnum squinted, seeing the black speck of a falcon streaking across a pillowy cumulous cloud.

“His birds are out, which means he’s in the open,” Bello whispered over his shoulder, his back to Barnum. “This will work perfectly.”

“Yup,” the exsheriff said absently, seeing something in his peripheral vision. He turned, and learned he could actually see a bullet coming when it was aimed straight at his head from a quarter of a mile away, even before he could hear the shot.

Par t Five A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to do otherwise.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Thirty Three

They’re getting to me somehow, Will Jensen wrote on the last page of his notebook. They’re inside my head and inside my body. They know where I’m going and they track my movements. I know it sounds crazy, and it IS crazy. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so. They figured out a way to screw me up.

Joe sat at the table in the statehouse and reread the last few pages of the notebook again. He wished Will had been more specific.

Who were “they”? What did he mean “they” were inside his head? If Will was right, how could “they” track his movements, as he claimed?

Then he read the next passage, the one that had chilled him in the cabin:

There is something so wrong with me. I’m not alone anymore. There is somebody inside my head. I’ve lost everything and my mind is next to go. Maybe it already has. I do things as if someone else were doing them. I watch myself say and do things, I know 262

it’s my body, but it isn’t me. Dear God, will you help me? Will anyone? Nobody else will except Stella.

Joe’s eyes left the page and settled on an envelope on the table, the invitation to Don and Stella Ennis’s party. Stella was the only person Will trusted. She was the connection. Was she close enough to Will in the end to report his movements? And how, exactly, could she facilitate “them” getting into his head, as he wrote?

Joe couldn’t make himself believe it was Stella, not after the way she had looked at him across the table. No one, he thought, could fake that kind of concern in her eyes, act that well. She had been on Will’s side in his struggle; he had trusted her. But during breakfast, when Joe had mentioned the traces of drugs the doctor said were in his system, she reacted unpredictably. The information clearly triggered something in her mind. But he knew one thing—he had to make a decision about Stella that had nothing to do with Will. And he had to do it tonight.

Joe rubbed his eyes. His head was full of questions about Will, but as of yet, he had no answers. He felt tired and frustrated and mainly just wished he had a beer. Forgetting about his stitches, he pushed back from the table and felt a sharp stab of pain. As the day wore on, his wound hurt more. Dr. Thompson had given him a prescription for Tylenol 3 to dull the pain, and he decided to take one.

As he filled a glass from the tap on the refrigerator, he looked absently out the window at Will Jensen’s old pickup in the driveway. Along the sidewalk, a neighbor wearing a tam was walking his dog, glancing furtively toward the house the way nosy neighbors do.

Suddenly, Joe froze, the tablet on his tongue, the water glass an inch from his lips, several thoughts hitting him at once.

Traces of drugs.

Will’s pickup.

The intruder in his yard that night, clunking against the house.

He knew how they had done it.

And they were doing it to him.

He lowered the glass, spit out the tablet, and opened the front door. The neighbor looked up, his eyes widening for a moment, then his face broke out into a relieved smile.

The neighbor said, “Goodness, for a second there I thought you were—”

“I know,” Joe said.

Puzzled, the man continued down the sidewalk.

Joe threw open the pickup door and shone a flashlight into the entrails of colored wires under the dashboard. It took a moment before he found what he was looking for.

Even as he touched it with the tips of his fingers, he was chilled how they had pulled it off.

He climbed out of the truck shaking his head.

“Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” Joe yelled to the neighbor, who was halfway down the block.

“Me?” the neighbor asked, pulling on his dog to turn it.

Joe waited until the man came back. “You’ve lived here for a long time, right? You knew Will Jensen?”

“Yes,” the man said cautiously.

“Do you walk your dog every night?” Joe asked.

The man nodded. “As long as the weather doesn’t keep us in.”

Joe’s mind was spinning. “Were you walking your dog the night Will Jensen died?”

Thirty Four

There were Secret Service agents in addition to armed security guards checking invitations at the front gate of the Ennis home. Joe waited behind a black Lexus SUV until it was cleared to proceed, wishing he’d washed the pickup before coming.

A security guard shone a flashlight into Joe’s face and asked him to remove his driver’s license from his wallet.

“I know you,” the guard said, seeing his name. “You’re the guy who shot Smoke Van Horn.”

Joe nodded and looked away. A Secret Service agent stepped from behind the guard and walked around the front of the truck to the passenger side and opened the door. The agent was lean and young, with an earpiece and cord that snaked down into his jacket. “Are there weapons in this truck?” he asked, looking around inside.

“Standard issue,” Joe said, pointing out the carbine under the seat, the shotgun in the gunrack, the cracker shell pistol in the glove box. He was glad he’d left his holster and weapon in the statehouse.

“This is a problem,” the agent said, stepping back and speaking into a microphone in his sleeve.

Joe waited, and several cars pulled up behind him.

Finally, the agent climbed into the cab with Joe and shut the door. “Sorry for the inconvenience, but the vice president will be here soon. We’ll need to park you away from the premises,” he said. “I’ll walk you to the front door, and I’ll need your keys while you’re inside. When you’re ready to go tonight, just tell one of my colleagues and I’ll meet you at the front door and walk you back to your truck.”

The Ennis home was spacious, with high ceilings, marble floors, and walls of windows that framed views of the Tetons. The furniture was made of stripped and varnished lodgepole pine, the style favored locally, and a massive elk antler chandelier with hundreds of small lights hung from a faux–logging chain. The home was crowded with guests bunched around portable bars, waiting for bartenders in tuxedos to pour their drinks. Joe scanned the crowd in the front room for anyone he might know, and saw no one familiar. Everyone, he noticed, looked exceedingly healthy and fit. The men wore open collars and jackets with expensive jeans or khakis, and the women wore cocktail dresses or ultrahip outdoor casual clothes. He felt out of place, as he normally did. The feeling was made worse when guests gestured toward him and nodded to one another and he realized he was, in fact, being talked about.

A tall man with silver hair and a dark tan—Pete Illoway, the Good Meat guru—broke out of one of the knots of people and strode across the floor with his hand held out to Joe in a showy way. Cautiously, Joe took his hand, wondering what he wanted, while Illoway leaned into him.

“Good work up in those mountains, Mr. Pickett,” Illoway said, pumping Joe’s hand. “Smoke Van Horn will not be missed. He was an anachronism, and the valley had passed him by.”

Joe said nothing, not accepting the praise nor refuting it, thinking about when Smoke had called himself an “arachnidism.”

“May I buy you a drink, sir?” Illoway asked.

“That’s okay, I can get it myself,” Joe said.

Illoway smiled paternalistically, then signaled a bartender and pointed to Joe.

“Bourbon and water, please,” he said.

Don Ennis strode purposefully into the room, parting the crowd, saw Joe, and stopped as if he’d hit an invisible wall. Ennis looked at Joe coolly for a moment, then broke into a stage grin and walked over just as Joe’s drink arrived.

“Glad you could make it, Mr. Pickett,” Ennis said. “I know Stella will be pleased.”

Joe wondered what he meant by that.

“Everyone’s talking about the incident up in the Thorofare,” Ennis said. “You’ve become quite the celebrity.”

“Was it really a gunfight like in the movies?” Illoway asked eagerly.

Joe shook his head. “Not really. It was pretty bad,” he said, the image coming back of Smoke’s vacant eyes, the way he chanted, It really hurts, it really hurts, it really hurts.

“Well done,” Ennis said smartly.

“I said it was bad,” Joe snapped back. “It isn’t something I’m proud of or something you two should be so damned pleased about.”

“But it couldn’t have happened to a better guy,” Illoway said, raising his glass as if he hadn’t heard a word Joe said.

“He was an absolute asshole, if you’ll pardon my French.

Totally against Beargrass Village, and very vocal about it in public meetings. He was Old World, not New World, if you know what I mean.”

“Speaking of,” Ennis interrupted. “Have you come to a decision on your recommendation? I know we’ve still got a few days, but . . .”

Joe had been waiting for this. What he wasn’t expecting was to find out Illoway and Ennis thought Joe had done them a huge favor by shooting Smoke.

“I still haven’t filed my recommendation,” Joe said evenly, “but I’m going to recommend that the concept not go forward unless you install some gates or bridges so the wildlife can migrate. We can’t have a situation where the game is forced to cross the highway to get to lower ground. That would be dangerous to drivers and to the herds.”

Something dark and cold passed over Ennis’s face, as if Joe had doublecrossed him. It was the same expression Joe had briefly seen when Stella entered the meeting room the week before.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Ennis said in a tight whisper. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Nope,” Joe said. “It’s the same recommendation Will Jensen was going to make, as you know. I found his last notebook where he came to that conclusion.”

Illoway reached for Ennis’s arm, but Ennis pulled away, his eyes narrowing into slits.